Pale Blue Dot: A history of chaos within a pixel.

I thought the most adequate way to add some sort of finality to a apocalyptic course was to share one of Carl Sagan's reflections on Earth. Here it goes...

Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

What I like about Sagan the most is that despite his status as a genius, he was always oddly normal in his explanations when he needed to. This is all very human and extremely concrete. There is only complexity in the images evoked, but it is relatively easy to comprehend. In my opinion, this reflection comes straight from his heart, after years of marveling at how meaningless our existence is as part of the universe, but how extraordinary our contributions can be. 

It is a humbling experience to note at how relative size can be. We feel small in our world, but the world feels small as part of the universe. From day one, to our present, and the future, everything is trapped in that minute pixel, including the successes and failures that define our existence in this world. There is so much futility in anything we do in this world, we give it meaning but the universe and earth are indifferent to our actions. Still, humanity must strive to provide a better world for the generation it passes the torch to. Less failures and tragedies can extend the life of this pixel.

If there is a pantheist god, these pixel's resemble birth marks on a being's body, and some of these marks would naturally go unnoticed. All is in this map of the universe; all we know and what is to be known someday is part of this infinite universe of infinite possibilities. It makes me feel small, but equally bewildered at all the possibilities of life in other pixels and grateful of my existence. It is egocentric to believe we are alone when the only thing that makes us reach such reckless conclusions is our own boundaries. Earth is all we know. In our lifetime, most likely, this is it, so we must make the best of it.

If most of the human race is not capable of producing something similar to these reflections, then it should be a mandate, for mankind's own sake, to remember Sagan's work. The peace Sagan has with the world and every living thing is what we need to repel the era of apocalyptic themes. This is the cure, and it doesn't take a genius astronomer to come up with it. Sensibility and reason are qualities we all possess. Think deeply about preserving this tiny pixel we call home, never to be endangered again by the desensitized who refuse to see more to it. Our existence, our only home, and the only one we have known for millions of years will be in constant jeopardy if we continue to meddle with this delicate pixel as if it were a renewable or automatically replaceable source of life.